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John jolts awake, sucking breath into his lungs greedily, pawing at his chest. He sits up, slides his sweaty, bare back against the bed frame.
In, out. In, out.
Breathe, John. Come on. Breathe.
It takes a few seconds to orient himself. As he looks around, John relaxes. He’s not in his apartment. He’s in his bedroom in the Watchtower. His beside lamp is dimmed, shrouding the room in a soft glow.
It’s eight at night, so he’s slept the day away.
Again.
If nothing else, at least it’s nice here.
These days, he avoids his apartment altogether. The Watchtower has become a second home to him over the last few months. Eventually, he will be expected to move into the Tower permanently. On the upside, the place offers peace. It is unfamiliar and doesn’t smell like John’s old life.
It is both a blessing and a curse that nobody comes to check on him in his room. He wouldn’t know what to say if they did, anyway.
Most likely he’d turn them away.
John doesn’t have a particularly good record at letting people close to him. This place offers him privacy.
His apartment feels too empty. Too unlike him. For years, John had a home. It had three bedrooms and a large backyard. It smelled like eucalyptus. It was warm.
He’d had gingham bedding, for fuck sake.
Then, Olivia had taken the house in the divorce, which is, fine—it was her that made it a home anyway. But he’d gotten a shitty apartment to hide out in between Val’s missions. He slept on a pull-out couch with a scraggy blanket and a dead pillow. He shaved if he felt like it, if he had somewhere public to be. Sometimes he cooked. Sometimes he didn’t.
But now he has a duty, contractual or otherwise, to protect and serve, to keep the vulnerable safe.
He just can’t bring himself to do it for him.
The thing is, John isn’t suicidal. Not in any traditional sense, anyway. He isn’t purposely looking for ways to die. He just—he thinks about it. To him, it is just one of those things that everyone does from time to time.
He won’t actually do it.
But for just—for a split second, he wanted to.
John wants to stop feeling so awful all of the time. He wakes up in the morning and the feeling lodges itself into his stomach, twisting up his guts like Christmas lights. It wreaks havoc on his nerves. He goes about his day and busies himself to avoid thinking about anything at all. It would be okay for that short portion of time, those blessed few hours where nothing exists inside of his head. And then, he’ll go to sleep at night and the feeling will creep back in, smacking into him like a freight train at full speed.
He can’t escape it, is the thing.
He’s tried. Fuck, has John tried to dig himself out of the hole he’s in. He’s put the work in, sure.
Bucky’s old therapist, Dr Raynor, can attest to that.
But John still has these moments, where he’s standing at a height, or he’s washing the dishes and sees a large knife, that he just wonders. Imagining what it would be like to feel nothing at all.
How easy it would be to make it happen.
To walk over a ledge, to let the carving knife slip between his ribs, to sneak into Yelena’s room and steal her pills.
But he isn’t going to do it.
Sure, he’s a little more unhappy than usual these days, but it comes with the territory. The internet has not been kind to him, perhaps, ever, but even more so in the last couple of months. The hate and death threats have doubled, and everywhere John goes, he’s reminded that he truly is alone, without any true friends or family.
And that’s—that’s fine, sure. It can be nice sometimes.
But the thing about John is, he’s used to people. He has shared tiny spaces with multiple men for most of his life, he was married for years. So to find himself suddenly so alone, whilst also being surrounded by people, it jars him.
It scares him.
“Fuck sake,” John mutters to himself, as he tosses and turns in his large, bed, unable to fall back to sleep. The clock on the bedside table reads 2:15am.
He knocked out for a few hours and woke up about an hour ago. He’s been trying to shut his brain off since.
So much for that, then.
John thinks about his talk with Bob a couple of weeks ago. You’re not bad, Walker.
Is that how Bob saw him?
Bob had said—Bob said he wasn’t bad. Not that he’s good, but that he isn’t bad. Acknowledging his mistakes, but saying that John isn’t the evil man he thinks he is.
John hadn’t known what to say to that. He had clapped Bob on the shoulder, and gone back to his room. A kind of calm exists between them now, since then, and John likes it.
He likes it a lot.
It has become easier to talk to Bob, now that they had that moment in the kitchen.
John can sleep again, too, but he has the nightmares still. They never really stopped, but it was easier to ignore when he couldn’t sleep.
The nightmares are back with a vengeance, now though. They’re worse, somehow. As if his night demons can tell he’s been trying to outrun them.
The latest one features everyone John has personally failed.
Lemar is at the forefront. The day that he died. The day he was murdered, John corrects. Because it was murder. It was unnecessary and in vain, and John hates that he’ll always feel responsible.
If he had just kept his head, if he had been a better Cap, a better friend—
John still can’t think about Lemar without the heavy weight of grief on his shoulders. He doesn’t know if it’ll ever get easier, if he’ll ever wake up one morning and be able to breathe properly.
He’ll have to ask Dr Raynor next week.
Lemar is the easiest one to face in his nightmares. He looks as he had in life. Smiling, smart—painfully loyal. He doesn’t hate John, he doesn’t curse him out. Lemar doesn’t blame him.
John has to bite into his hand to stop his screams.
But he isn’t free from the torment. John sees it all—his father’s death, his mother. He sees himself neglecting his son, sees Olivia leaving him.
She was right to do it. He knows that. And no part of him is angry with her—at least, not anymore. He had been, in the beginning. For disrupting his perfect life. For leaving him when he had nobody else. Olivia was all John wanted for so many years. And then it was the shield. And now, it’s just peace and quiet. Maybe a happy moment or two.
So, he doesn’t hate Olivia for leaving him. He was a bad husband. He is a bad father, just like his father before him. He can’t hate Olivia for her choice. He thinks he could even love her for it. Her strength. Her love for their son. She chose their son over John’s bullshit, something John never would or could have done.
He would never be as strong as her.
It was so much easier back in high school, when winning a game or passing history class was all he worried about. When he agonised over Olivia calling him, what he would say to her, if he should kiss her.
It was easier, then, to convince himself that he wanted this. A nuclear family. A wife and a kid and maybe even a dog. Everyone wanted that, didn’t they? And if they didn’t, then there was something wrong there, right? If John didn’t want the right thing, then there was something wrong with him. And John—he wanted to be normal.
He wanted to be liked, to be loved. John wanted to be respected.
John hears his mother’s voice in his head. No good, I’ll tell you. No damn good. What a sin.
His cousin had just come out, and it hadn’t ended well. It was all his parents could talk about, how Alex was disgusting and wasn’t welcome around Jonathan anymore.
They spoke about it—about Alex, as if he were a disease to be avoided.
That kickstarted John’s panic attacks.
John remembers being a closeted sixteen year old, sobbing into his pillow at night so his parents wouldn’t hear him. He remembers feeling the shame bubble in his gut at Sunday mass, knowing he was an imposter, a liar. Drenched in sin and unable to be washed clean.
His whole life, John has been afraid of being found out, unearthed.
He remembers crying, begging to be changed, to be like everyone else. For years, John would hide inside of himself. He’d beg and sob and bite his fists until they were bloody.
And then he’d met Olivia, and she had been the answer to all of his prayers.
John knows that he loved her in some capacity. But he didn’t love her for the right reasons—he couldn’t. And he was a horrible man for it. For hiding behind her when he should have let her be free.
But that’s John, isn’t it?
Cowardly. Always doing the wrong thing.
You were wrong about me, Lemar. He looks up at the ceiling. You were wrong.
The nightmares always shift. His father features in a few, but John is starting to forget his father’s voice, forgetting how much being around him felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
His childhood wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful, by Bob’s standards, but it wasn’t good, either. His mom had been a poltergeist pretty much all of his life. There but not really there, in any physical sense.
Sure, he had all he needed, except love.
That’s why he signed up pretty much out of high school, needing the escape, needing to be worth something, desperately. If he wasn’t important at home, then he’d make himself be of use to someone, somewhere. Even if it killed him.
(He used to wish that it would. That his mother would be proud of him if he returned home in a box, with a certificate and a medal that showed he was worth something. He’d done something good.)
John had wanted things throughout life, of course.
A new gameboy when he was eight.
For the brown eyed girl in science class to go out with him.
For his team to win state championships.
For his heart to not race when the team changed in the locker rooms.
To be Captain America.
And for a short while—John had all of it, and more. He’d gotten his wishes.
The game boy he’d broken by accident a few months after getting it.
He’d gotten the girl, but lost her in the end.
His team had won, at the cost of Lemar’s ACL.
He had to change alone in the showers.
He’d been Captain America. He was Captain America. And then he wasn’t. Now, he’s just John.
And being just John hurt.
So, that’s why, after agonising about it for hours, John walks to his private bathroom. He digs into his toiletry bag beneath his sink until his fingers wrap around a little yellow pill bottle.
Sorry, Yelena, he thinks.
He scribbles a pathetic letter to his team, two or three lines long. It probably won’t even be read. He hopes not.
John stares at himself hard in the mirror. He looks so much like his father it spins his stomach. He closes his eyes, puffing out a soft breath. He feels calm, almost. John thought that he would feel more, at the end.
Maybe he has already resigned himself to this fate.
He knows he can die, but will the serum somehow protect him from an overdose? He hopes not, again.
It would be one pathetic walk of shame back to bed.
John unscrews the cap with ease, and dumps out the whole bottle.
But then Bob’s face pops into his mind.
Bob. Asleep down the hall. Maybe awake. Maybe reading. Maybe pacing his bedroom, chewing on his fingers.
Bob. John says aloud, quiet in his bathroom. He lets the pills fall into the sink.
Bob. John thinks, as he leaves the bathroom and walks down the hall.
John makes it to Bob’s room in seconds. He doesn’t hesitate as he knocks on the door, two gentle taps. If Bob is asleep, he won’t hear it, and John can go back into his bedroom and—
The door opens.
Bob rubs his eye, headphones around his neck. He offers John a tired, kind smile, and steps further into his room, allowing John the room to make his way in.
He looks warm, is all John can think. Warm and comfortable, in a sweater and pajama pants.
He looks good. Simple, but good.
Bob’s mouth opens, John follows his lips as he speaks. He must be saying John’s name, or asking him what he’s doing here, or something. But John doesn’t hear a thing. He stares at the gentle flush on Bob’s cheeks, the tint of Bob’s lips, the muscle in his neck that jumps as Bob swallows.
John, as if in a trance, doesn’t acknowledge anything that Bob says. He stares at Bob, trying to get lost in him. It’s easy, is the thing. All John has to do is look at him. It’s when Bob takes a cautious step forward, that John finally jolts, as if being awoken for the first time.
Bob grips John by the shoulders, trying to pull him back into reality.
John knows that Bob never would have touched him if he didn’t have himself under control. They had spoken about it, briefly. John didn’t mind being touched so long as it was Bob who touched him. Bob settles something unruly inside of John, but he doesn’t have the time to unpack all of that now.
“I was going to kill myself a minute ago.” John admits quietly as Bob freezes, his grip on John’s shoulders weakening.
Bob’s voice is quiet, barely there. “John—“
“I had it all ready. The note, everything. Then you.. your face popped into my head and I just... couldn’t.” John’s voice is raspy, as if it hurts to talk. It does. It—everything hurts. John has been in constant pain since he was seventeen damn years old. “I couldn’t do it, Bob.”
John has spent so many years drowning in silent depression, drowning in what he thought he deserved. He had taken his suffering in stride, some naive part of him wanting desperately to be seen as strong. He used to think that one day his efforts would be rewarded.
How wrong he has always been.
There is something deeply rotten about him, his mother used to say. He has a bad side to him. So many nights John has lain awake and thought about his death. About how much better off everyone would be if he ceased to exist. If he had been dusted in the snap, if he had never come home—
“John—“
Bob doesn’t say anything else, because there is nothing left to say.
He steps forward tentatively and takes John into his arms. He’s leaner than John is, and shorter, but John fits into his arms perfectly all the same. He melts into the first genuine hug he has gotten in what feels like months.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Bob whispers, close to John’s shoulder. He sounds close to tears. “I’m really glad you didn’t.”
John blinks away the tears caught in his lashes. “I’m okay, Bob.”
“You’re not,” Bob shakes his head, holding on tighter, as if to say, I’m here. I’m here and I’m not leaving you. “You’re not okay, John. I know it because—because I’m not, either. I know how it feels. You’re suffering and it’s not okay. But I’m.. I’m here.”
John lowers his head, his chin resting atop Bob’s hair. “Don’t let go.”
“I’m not. I won’t.” Bob promises, sniffling. “John. I won’t let go.”
“I don’t want to be alone, right now. Can I stay here, with you tonight?” John asks, hoarse, quiet. He can feel Bob’s heart thumping.
“Yeah—yeah, of course.” Bob says, squeezing him tighter. John’s eyes are firmly closed, now. He lets himself be held. Bob is warm and firm and smells nice. He’s safe. John is safe with him.